Wellington City Council, what are you doing?

So the anti-graffiti campaign for Wellington has been up and running for a while and to be honest my take on the whole campaign was “it’s butt ugly, but its WCC so at least it is not going to leave Wellington, and hopefully we won’t have to put up with it for too long”. That’s kinda where I left it. A number of people have noted just how darn ugly it is, but that was as far as it went. I thought…

Here is a visual of one of the AdShels:

Last night, talking to my lovely new flatmate who is the editor for the Capital Times, I found out just how bad this campaign is. The ‘graffiti’ that is responsible for this supposed outbreak, is actually some artwork which was COMMISSIONED. The very talented drypnz who has done a number of pieces around Wellington - including outside Rex Royale, one of my favs:gets paid for this work, because he is talented and people appreciate good street art.

The more I heard about this, and the more I have read about it this morning, the worse it gets. So it would seem that the photographer for this campaign just went out and took a photo of graffiti, they didn't realize that it was ‘legal’ street art. When the Capital Times hit the Council up about this, they said that they had spoken with Dryp and apologized. Dryp never had a phone call – and lets be fair, its not hard to find him – and so the council retracted their statement and said that someone (I’m wondering if that might be Wellington Wall Street) have voiced their concerns about using commissioned work to highlight ‘illegal’ graffiti and the Council apologized to them. Awesome guys.

So, let’s check this off:

1. Develop an ugly idea for a campaign
2. Take a photo of commissioned work to portray to the public as ‘illegal’
3. Force the Wellington public to see this awful creative
4. Claim to have apologized to the artist
5. Retract statement and say that they will stop producing the posters (I don’t believe they have said they will stop the whole campaign though

Good work. And who is responsible for this campaign? Is there an agency behind it? A misguided design studio? Worse still, was it done in-house? Some of the comments from Wellingtonista's blog about this campaign have been hilarious. This is my favourite though:

"I found the whole campaign creepy. All the people in the adverts were white, suburban and somehow infected by an 'otherness' from the presence of street art/vandalism."

Would love to know any other information if anyone knows anything.

Updated: Richard from WCC commented on this post on my other blog - and for the record, this is what he had to say:
We at the City Council just want to clarify that we didn't mean to use graffiti art on advertising for our anti-graffiti campaign. It was an honest mistake. We did not mean to cause offence and apologise to Drypnz and any other artist who's been offended.
As I told the Capital Times, we were unaware that it was legal graffiti art when we took the photos for the campaign and will not be using it on any future advertising for the campaign.
We at the City Council now feel suitably chastised for our lack of street-cred and general blundering absence of cool.
You're welcome to your views about whether the campaign is 'ugly' or not - but it was produced because a majority of Wellingtonians have a fairly low tolerance for illegal graffiti - especially tagging (and yes we think we now know the difference between tagging and street art). We don't intend to stop advertising our anti-graffiti kits - which have been flying off the shelves. Perhaps that's an indication that people in the real world have a problem with their neighbourhoods being vandalised.
Just to close, perhaps you should consider your favourite comment from Wellingtonista: "I found the whole campaign creepy. All the people in the adverts were white, suburban and somehow infected by an 'otherness' from the presence of street art/vandalism." At the risk of running up against your perceptions, and the perceptions of whoever made the comment, we're aware that at least one of the few people in the images doesn't consider themselves to be 'white' at all. And since when was it a crime to be 'suburban'?
Richard MacLean - Wellington City Council

At least they are paying attention to what is being said about them.